Bay Area arts news, Dec. 29

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, December 29, 2011

Photo: Tom Toro

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Bay Area arts news, Dec. 29

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Cartoonist still reaching for the top

In 2007, Tom Torofound himself unemployed and under a mountain of debt after completing an undergraduate degree at Yale and two years of film school at New York University. Morbidly depressed, he returned to his parents' house in El Cerrito. But sitting in his childhood bedroom, Toro, 29, considered that his unfortunate state of events could spell a fresh start. "Faced with this situation, I did what any rational person would do," he says. "I drew cartoons."

Cartooning was not new to Toro. He was an obsessive doodler as a kid, the kind who filled the margins of his school notebooks with characters and froze frames of Disney movies so that he could copy the animation. During college, he was the cartoon editor of the Yale Herald. "I actually realized it could be a career, not a hobby."

For two years, while working in the box office of Berkeley Rep, Toro dutifully crafted captions and cartoons, sending about a dozen a week to the New Yorker, the only publication in the country that can sanctify a budding cartoonist's career. The magazine accepted his 610th submission.

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"It came out the week of my 28th birthday," Toro remembers. "The cover was by Dan Clowes, and it showed a young man hanging his Ph.D. diploma in his childhood bedroom. It was an odd coincidence."

Toro has since moved into his own apartment, and he continues to submit a dozen or so cartoons to the New Yorker weekly. In the past year and a half, the magazine has bought 16 of his 1,600 submissions. "It's a kind of life of rejection," Toro deadpans. "It's a bittersweet game of odds, and you have to overwhelm them."

Among the bittersweet realities of Toro's cartooning success is that the pay is mediocre. The New Yorker abandoned its staff cartoonists several years ago and now offers its stable of 30 or so regular ones a fee of $675 per cartoon, with old-timers such as Roz Chastand George Booth probably earning more.

Last year, Toro was about to sign a distribution deal with a newspaper syndicate, but it was swallowed by a larger company that decided to limit its contracts. "It's always been hard to be an artist," Toro says without spite. "But now it's like the 99 percent and the 1 percent - there's no middle class of artists anymore."

Toro's cartoons excel with world-weary, deadpan humor. "I try to script a scene and show a moment of that scene," Toro explains, revealing his film training. "I like to show a crazy situation that people are dealing with in a calm way." Yet what makes the cartoons work is Toro's fondness for the absurdity of human interactions. His characters are always expressionless.

Toro has no immediate plans to leave the box office at Berkeley Rep, where he enjoys the camaraderie of other artists supplementing their income. But his goal is to become a published writer as well as cartoonist. He recently finished a novel, "The Miracle of the Mountain," a love story about a young American writer who helps an Egyptian woman produce a radio broadcast about the Miracle of the Mountain, an ancient tale told to them by a Coptic Christian garbage collector.

The novel is loosely based on Toro's experience making a documentary about the garbage collectors of Cairo, "Marina of the Zabbaleen," which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and screened at Cannes. So far, Toro's first literary work has been rejected by literary agents. But given his track record as an autodidactic, driven artist, odds are that Toro's name will soon appear on a book as well as on a cartoon.

Things to do today

The Asian Art Museumis holding a Bollywood dance party for 11- to 15-year-olds and their families. The party comes with some education about Bhangra, a popular Indian dance combining Punjabi folk traditions with Western pop music (hip-hop, funk, reggae). And tonight at 7, SFMOMA will screen Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey," which begins with our primate progenitors' first use of tools and ends with a human inquiry into the cosmos - good fodder, with meditative cinematography and stunning special effects, to close 2011.

Things to do New Year's Eve

Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma pays tribute to Tom Lehrerin "Tomfoolery," a cabaret-style musical revue featuring such Lehrer classics as "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," "The Masochism Tango," "The Vatican Rag" and a Gilbert and Sullivan-esque recitation of a table of elements, starring Eric Morris(formerly of the Edlos). And at the Rrazz Room in San Francisco's Hotel Nikko, Kim Nalley and Houston Person ring in 2012 with some soulful singing and Champagne.

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